The attractiveness of a wireless communication products such as cellular phones or WLAN transceivers can be closely linked with the length of time the device can operate between battery recharges. In order to improve the battery life between recharges, it is necessary to reduce the power consumption of the product. As a result, a factor that contributes to the success of a consumer communication product is its power consumption.
Performance and features of communication products constantly increase. As a result, required functionality and complexity of such products are seen to steadily increase in time. Increased functionality and complexity lead to higher power consumption. As a result, there is need for continuing improvements in reducing product power consumption. Several techniques are currently available for reducing the power consumption of communication products. One of the techniques involves managing power consumption by turning off the power of unused system components, or by reducing the clocking rate of those unused system components. For example, controlling the power or clock rates of transceiver system components (such as MAC, PHY, Radio, and PA) has been used. However, such power management techniques may not be effective. Two of the reasons limiting the effectiveness of such techniques are described below.
First, power management by controlling the powering or clocking of system components may not be suitable and may yield inefficient results when applied to certain transceiver architectures. For example, Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based transceivers have a large power consumption processor core that is always kept running even if the processor is idle or there are reduced computational requirements. Therefore, managing power consumption of DSP based transceiver can be very complicated and can essentially yield low efficiency (as it may not be possible to turn off or reduced the clock rate of processor components).
Second, some simple power management techniques are known to yield power consumption reduction. These simple techniques can include turning the receiver strip when the transmitter is being used. However, the performance of such simple techniques is limited since they generally do not utilize knowledge of communication protocol, transceiver architecture, host data rate, and available date of a communication channel.
As such, it would be highly desirable to provide a method, system, and apparatus to reduce power consumption of digital communication transceivers.